Cold Open (0:00 to 1:50)
The flats (0:00 to 1:50)
Mouth of the bay // tide flats
The sea is gone.
Rin is standing where it used to be. Water to the tops of her boots, black and flat and still, running out to the edge of the world. The sky has gone the color of a bruise two days old. Twenty meters above her, Azure Fang's hatch hangs open, and she does not remember opening it.
She remembers the dagger going in. She remembers the scream coming up through the link, not in her ears but in her ribs, as if Tidemaw had been living in there all along and had only now found the door. Then a gap. Two minutes, maybe three. A song with the chorus cut out.
Count it back, she tells herself. Five, six, seven, eight.
Nothing comes.
Out on the flats, patches of the water are glowing. Soft teal, here and there, like something underneath is breathing in its sleep.
There is a man kneeling in it.
She knows the coat before she knows the face. Long and dark and soaked through, the hem floating around him. Then the hair, too long now, plastered to his forehead. Then the scar through his left eyebrow, exactly where it was the last time she touched it.
RIN: Kaito.
It comes out cracked. A year and a half without saying it out loud, and her mouth has forgotten the shape.
He lifts his head. Under the skin at his collarbone, thin lines of light are branching, slow, like frost crossing a window. Teal. The same teal as the water.
She doesn't decide to touch it. Her hand is already there.
The glow jumps into her palm and the flats go out like a light.
Dark. Cold. Weight. The whole bay pressing down on her shoulders, her lungs, her eyes. Somewhere far below, something vast turns over in its sleep: a curve of shell wider than the Breakwater, rolling, settling. And an eye. Not open. Opening.
She tears her hand away and the sky comes back. She's on her knees in the water, gasping. His eyes have gone the same teal as the glow.
KAITO: It's coming.
RIN: What is?
He doesn't answer. He's looking past her, out where the sea used to be, the way he used to watch the clock in the sim bay before a run.
Under her own heartbeat, she feels the other one. Slow. Heavy. Out of time with hers, the way it has been every night since the funeral, every night she has lain awake and told no one. It has never been this close. It has never been this loud.
Her collar crackles against her throat.
NARI (comms): Rin. You flew off two minutes ago. You didn't answer anyone.
RIN (comms): I'm here.
NARI (comms): Where is here?
Rin looks at Kaito. Kaito looks at the sea.
Back where the city is, the first siren starts to climb.
CUT TO BLACK.
TITLE: TIDEWALL: IRON TIDE
Act One: The Spawn Tide (1:50 to 9:10)
The lights go out (1:50 to 3:20)
Tide Wards // waterfront
Nari hears it before she sees it. A click in the city's grid, then another, then a run of them, like knuckles cracking down a spine. On her map, a block of the Tide Wards goes from gold to black.
Then the next one.
She's holding Blue Signal over the avenue with the hex-field still up, the same shield that went over Miko ten minutes ago, and every gauge she has is telling her to drop it and land. She doesn't. Below her the flood is running backward, out of the streets toward the empty bay, brown and fast, dragging cafe chairs and laundry and a vending machine that bobs past with its lights still on. Every building it leaves behind wears a fresh ring of mud at the second floor.
Four blocks east, Tidemaw lies across the ward where Rin put it down. The green light inside it is going out one section at a time.
Her sensor feed starts filling with warm shapes on the power pylons. Flat. Six legs. The size of cars. Hundreds of them, going hand over hand along the cables.
Skitters. Every time one bites through a line, another block goes quiet in her headset. Click. Black.
NARI (comms): They came in on the flood. They're on every line along the water.
AYA (comms): I see them.
So quiet Nari almost loses it in the static. In the corner of her screen, Aya's vitals sit where they've sat for ten minutes. Heart rate high. Link at nine percent. White Petal is standing in a side street with its head bowed and rain running off its shoulders, like it's waiting to be forgiven.
Below Blue Signal, Crimson Howl kneels in the flood up to its chest. No lights. No heat on thermal. Twenty-two meters of pink armor gone cold as a statue.
Nari watched it happen. The power died, the legs let go, and the mech started kneeling into the water with Miko sealed inside. A dead hatch doesn't open on its own. Miko cranked it by hand and came up out of it like a diver coming up for air, and Nari threw the shield over her one second before Tidemaw's tail came down.
Now Miko is sitting on top of the shoulder, soaked to the skin, one boot hanging over a twenty-meter drop, waving both arms.
MIKO (shouting up): Hey! Hey! Is my mech dead or is it just sleeping?
NARI (comms): Your collar still works, Miko.
MIKO (comms): Oh. Cool. So is it dead?
NARI (comms): It's dead.
MIKO (comms): Love that. Love that for me.
Nari almost smiles. Then another block goes dark. Click.
Rin comes back (3:20 to 4:00)
Tide flats // Azure Fang
A Kurenai recovery tiltrotor comes down on the flats, its rotors pressing the water flat in rings, floodlights swinging. Two medics in Kurenai gray drop out of the side door before it has settled.
RYO (comms): Rin. Recovery has him. I need you back in your seat. The ward is losing power block by block.
It's the voice Ryo uses in press rooms. Calm. Pre-approved. Rin looks at Kaito. He's still watching the water.
RIN: I'll come back.
He looks at her then. For one second the glow drains out of his eyes and he's only Kaito. Wet, tired, twenty-six. The man who used to lift his coffee can at her across the sim bay.
KAITO: Go.
She climbs. Hand over hand up the line, and she watches him the whole way, the way you watch a light on the water to keep it from going out. The medics walk him to the tiltrotor. He lets them. He never once looks up at her. He never stops looking at the sea.
The hatch seals. The screens bloom. Her collar locks into the headrest with a sound she feels in her teeth, and the link catches wrong, a missed step on a staircase in the dark. On the back of Azure Fang's head, the cobalt ribbons flicker, gutter, and come back at half length.
MIKO (comms): You good, captain?
Miko asks it before every launch. Every stage. Every sound check in every arena they've ever played. And Rin always answers before the question is finished. It's the one thing in her life that has never been late.
RIN (comms): ...Always.
Late. Half a beat.
Miko's channel goes quiet. No joke. No threat to steal Rin's onigiri. Just breathing, waiting for the rest of the count.
Then every subway exit in the Tide Wards bursts open at once.
Ninety seconds (4:00 to 5:40)
Tide Wards // east avenue
From up on the shoulder, Miko sees them before the sensors do. They come up the subway stairs the way water comes out of a drain when the pipes back up. All at once, and black.
Rootlings. Human-sized. Built out of black bone, arms too long, hands hooked like gaffs. No faces, just one green slit where a face should go. Forty of them. Sixty. They don't even look up at the mechs. They don't care about the mechs.
NARI (comms): They're running east. Toward the Tide Wards school. The shelter under it is full.
Miko knows that school. She knows the bakery on the corner across from it, and the laundromat with the broken sign, and the alley you cut through to get to her parents' shop. She can see all of it from up here. She can see the shelter doors.
MIKO (comms): That's two streets from my block.
RIN (comms): Miko, stay where you...
MIKO (comms): That's two streets from my mom.
She's already going back down into the hatch. Into the dark box she just climbed out of to keep from drowning. Her boots find the rungs by memory. The cockpit smells like wet wiring and her own fear.
JUN (comms): Miko, it's Jun. I'm on the hangar channel. Listen to me. Red handle under your seat. Pull it.
Jun never sounds like this. Jun sounds like noodles and wrench jokes and "don't touch that." Right now he sounds like a man holding a door shut.
MIKO (comms): What does the red handle do?
JUN (comms): Reserve cell. Ninety seconds of movement. No weapons. And when it runs out, it runs out for good tonight. You understand?
MIKO (comms): Ninety seconds. Got it.
JUN (comms): Miko. I mean it. No weapons.
MIKO (comms): I heard you!
She pulls it. Somewhere under her a cell thumps awake like a second heart. Crimson Howl's eyes come on, dim orange, and the whole mech groans, a long low complaint up through the frame, the sound of something big getting out of bed in a bad mood.
It stands up out of the flood with water pouring off its shoulders. And she runs it.
She doesn't dodge. She doesn't fight. She doesn't have anything to fight with. She drives it to the mouth of the avenue, swings it sideways, and plants both feet. Twenty-two meters of pink armor, wedged wall to wall across the street, between the Rootlings and the school.
They hit it like surf.
MIKO (comms): Yeah! Come on! That's it, come ON!
They climb her. They claw at her. Then the Skitters come down off the pylons and find her legs, and through the link she feels every one of their grinding little mouths like a bite on her own calves.
MIKO (comms): Okay. Okay, they're chewing. Jun? They're chewing on me.
JUN (comms): Fifty seconds.
MIKO (comms): That is not what I asked!
Petal on the wire (5:40 to 6:50)
Tide Wards // power pylons
The Skitters are crawling inland along the cables, toward the substation that feeds the school. If it goes, the shelter's pumps go. And the shelter is a basement, in a ward that was underwater an hour ago.
Aya knows all of this the way you know a song you've rehearsed too many times. The facts are just there, in order. Her hands are the part that won't cooperate.
She lands White Petal on top of a pylon without a sound.
Nine percent. Too low for the Petal Dance. Too low for almost anything. She draws one sword instead of two, and she steps out onto the cable.
Inside the cockpit, her lips move.
AYA (whispered): Mi-an-hae-yo.
She doesn't know who she's apologizing to. The Skitters. The cable. The girl she was before she was good at this.
One long draw down the line. The Skitters on it come apart and fall into the black water below, and the cable doesn't even swing.
Her hands are shaking on the grips. She watches them shake. She does it again on the next span, and the next, and the next. The cuts never shake. Only the hands.
Four drones (6:50 to 7:40)
Tide Wards // east avenue
NARI (comms): I have four drones left and one bad idea.
RIN (comms): Do it.
Rin watches the four drones go out low over the avenue in a line, cores flaring white. The Rootlings flinch from the light and turn, all of them at once, the way a school of fish turns. Toward the only gap left around Miko's wall.
The gap where Azure Fang is standing.
NARI (comms): They're yours.
Rin drops into a crouch with the katana still in its sheath. Every alarm in the cockpit is telling her to draw. Red on red on red.
She waits.
Two hundred meters. A hundred. They bunch up between two flooded buses, right where Nari herded them, a black knot of arms and green slits.
Kaito's voice, three years old, in her head. Wait for it to open up. Then don't miss.
Five. Six. Seven.
She draws.
One cut, low across the street. The blade lights the whole avenue blue for a quarter of a second. When it fades, the front of the wave is gone.
MIKO (comms): Captain! That was so hot!
JUN (comms): Fifteen seconds, Miko.
The second wave (7:40 to 8:20)
Tide Wards // subway mouth
The subway stairs erupt again. More Rootlings. Then more. On the pylons Aya just cleared, twice as many Skitters are climbing up out of the water, slick and patient.
Rin tastes copper. Her nosebleed is back, warm on her lip. Over her shoulder, her rifle tries to unfold and folds itself back down with an error tone, polite, like an apology.
Across the ward, White Petal's sigil goes from gray to dark.
JUN (comms): Miko. Time.
Crimson Howl's lights go out. The mech doesn't fall. It locks where it stands, a dead pink wall across the avenue, covered in black bone and teeth.
Then Miko's voice comes on the channel, low and rough. Rin has known her three years. She has never heard her sound like this.
MIKO (comms): Rin. I can't hold anything anymore.
RIN (comms): I know.
On the map, the red smear reaches the end of Miko's wall and starts to flow around it.
Kurogane (8:20 to 9:10)
Old fish pier
The sound gets there first. A roar coming in fast and low off the water, getting bigger the way thunder does when you're standing under it.
Then something hits the old fish pier at full boost.
It doesn't land. It arrives. The pier cracks end to end, slabs tipping up out of the water like teeth. And coming out of the spray, already moving, is a mech none of them has ever seen.
Matte black. A narrow, faceless head with one tall horn and a V-shaped visor burning cold white. Long arms. Hands like claws.
Its boosters fire once. It skids sideways across the flooded street, throwing a wave, and goes into the Rootlings with its bare hands. A claw closes and a dozen of them crumple. An arm sweeps and the street is clear. One leaps for its visor and it catches it without turning its head.
Rin has spent three years learning how a mech moves. This one doesn't move like a mech. It moves like someone who has done this before and is bored of it.
NARI (comms): That's not one of ours.
MIKO (comms): Then whose is it?
Two more black shapes drop out of the rain. One is huge, bigger than Crimson Howl, and it walks to the subway entrance and plants itself over the stairs like a door slamming shut. The other lands on top of a container crane at the port with a rifle almost as long as it is tall, and the Skitters on the pylons start dropping, one shot at a time, a metronome.
RYO (comms): Hold your fire. They're ours.
NARI (comms): VANTA is a sim team.
RYO (comms): Not tonight.
The first black mech clears the street in ninety seconds. Then it stops dead in the middle of the avenue, rain running off its plates.
RIN (comms): Identify.
Static.
Slowly, its head turns. Not toward the street. Toward Azure Fang. It holds there.
Rin can't see who is inside. She has the strangest feeling that whoever it is can see exactly who is inside her.
Act Two: Containment (9:10 to 11:00)
The pod (9:10 to 10:20)
Old fish pier
What's left of the pier sits under Kurenai floodlights, white and flat and too bright, like an operating room built on the water. The tiltrotor has set down on the last good slab. Beside it sits a sealed white containment pod the size of a shipping container, with one small round window.
Kaito's face is in the window.
Next to the pod stands a woman in a gray Kurenai lab coat, one hand resting flat on its side. Late fifties. Short gray hair. Reading glasses pushed up on her head and forgotten there. She isn't giving orders. She's just standing with her hand on the pod, the way you keep a hand on a sleeping child's back.
Rin knows her. Everyone in Year One knew her. Dr. Jang Mi-ran. Head of resonance research. The woman who ran the Pilot Zero program. The woman who signed off on the deep test.
RIN (comms): Doctor Jang.
Dr. Jang looks up at Azure Fang. She doesn't look surprised to see it. She looks like someone who has been waiting a year and a half to be found out.
DR. JANG: Hello, Rin.
RIN (comms): You told us he was dead.
DR. JANG: We told you what we believed.
RIN (comms): Do you believe it now?
Dr. Jang looks at the window. Kaito is looking back at her.
DR. JANG: I don't know what I believe tonight.
The huge black mech walks over, slow, its footsteps shaking water off the slabs. It takes the pod in both hands and lifts it off the concrete like it weighs nothing at all.
RIN (comms): Ryo. Where are you taking him?
RYO (comms): Somewhere safe. For everyone.
RIN (comms): He's one of us.
RYO (comms): He was. Tonight he walked out of the sea, glowing, ten minutes after a Leviathan. You've drilled the protocol a hundred times. Unknown contact goes to containment until we know what it is.
A pause. When he speaks again his voice is softer, and that's worse.
RYO (comms): If it were anyone else, you'd be giving the order.
She would. She opens her mouth and finds nothing there.
Through the pod window, Kaito finds Azure Fang in the dark. He can't see her through the armor. He looks right at her anyway. Under her heartbeat, the other one beats once. Hard. Like a knock.
The three black mechs lift off and carry him away, low over the water, until their running lights are three small stars and then none.
The van (10:20 to 11:00)
Coast road // 4:00 AM
Four in the morning. The Kurenai van crawls back toward the Breakwater through a city with no lights, the headlights catching flooded cars and a traffic signal hanging dead from its wire. The four of them are still in pilot suits under rain jackets that don't fit.
Aya fell asleep before the first corner, her head against the window, mouth open. Nari has her phone in her lap and hasn't touched it since they got in. Rin is in the back corner, where she always sits, where nobody can see her face unless she lets them.
Miko leans her head against the seat and closes her eyes. Her calves still hurt. Not her calves. Crimson Howl's. Hers. It doesn't matter anymore which.
MIKO: The guy on the flats.
Nothing from the back corner.
MIKO: That was him.
The wipers squeak. Somewhere outside, a dog is barking at the dark.
MIKO: Wasn't it.
The van goes over a pothole full of mud. Nari glances back at Rin, then down at her phone, like the phone might have an answer.
Rin doesn't say yes. She doesn't say no.
MIKO: Okay.
Miko keeps her eyes shut for the rest of the ride. Her jaw doesn't unclench once.
Act Three: The Morning After (11:00 to 15:40)
The gym (11:00 to 12:50)
Tide Wards school // gym
Morning comes in gray and wet. The gym of the Tide Wards school sits right above the shelter that held all night, and it smells like four hundred people who didn't sleep. Four hundred cots in rows, basketball lines running under all of them. In the corner, a TV with the sound off runs a news crawl: KURENAI: OVERNIGHT SONAR READING A RESIDUAL ECHO. NO FURTHER THREAT. Nobody is watching it.
Miko comes in the side door in a black hoodie, cap low, mask pulled down under her chin, a crate of bottled water on her hip. The mask is a disguise. It has never once worked.
She finds them by the bleachers. Her mother is folding blankets that are already folded. Her father is sitting with his big crane-operator hands hanging between his knees, like he doesn't know what to do with them now that there's nothing to lift. And in the middle of the cot, small and upright and furious about being in a gym, is her grandmother.
Miko sets the crate down. Her mother looks up. Then her mother grabs her so hard her cap falls off.
Over her mother's shoulder, Miko sees her father's face, and she doesn't have to ask about the shop. The water went through the front window. The water went up to the ceiling. Thirty years of noodles and pickled plums and the good knife.
Her mother pushes a paper bag into her hands without letting go of her. Onigiri. The last batch from the shop, made before the water came.
Five minutes later Miko is sitting on the end of the cot, cheeks full, halfway through her third onigiri with a fourth already in her other hand, and her grandmother has climbed up to stand on the cot.
GRANDMOTHER: (to the whole gym) That is my granddaughter. Kazama Miko. From TIDEWALL. The famous one.
Four hundred heads turn.
MIKO: (mouth full) Grandma. Grandma, sit down.
GRANDMOTHER: She's on television! She sings with the girl with the blue hair!
A little boy appears at Miko's knee holding out a marker and his own arm. Then three more kids. Then a line. Miko signs a cast, a juice box, one kid's forehead and somebody's grandmother's slipper, and her own grandmother supervises every signature like a bodyguard with a clipboard.
When the line runs out, the old woman sits down beside her and looks up at the high gym windows, at the brown line drawn across the building outside.
GRANDMOTHER: The sea doesn't come up that far on its own.
MIKO: Grandma.
GRANDMOTHER: When I was a girl, they said it only came up like that when the Sleeper turned over in his bed.
MIKO: Not the Sleeper again.
Her grandmother pats her knee and doesn't argue. Somehow that's worse than if she had.
By the doors, a guy in hangar coveralls tied at the waist is unloading a cart of noodle cups. Grease on his cheek, cap on backward. Jun. He spots her across the gym and something in his shoulders lets go.
JUN: You look terrible.
MIKO: You told me no weapons and then you counted down at me like a bomb.
JUN: You listened, though.
MIKO: Don't get used to it.
He grins. She grins back. It's the first time her face has done that since the red handle.
Fourteen countries (12:50 to 13:40)
Kurenai Ent. // dressing room
The dressing room at Kurenai Entertainment is all mirrors and warm bulbs, and four girls who haven't slept look back from every one of them.
Aya has taken the chair in the corner with a paperback she isn't reading. It's easier to watch the room from behind a book. Nobody asks a girl with a book how she is.
Sora has three pins in her mouth and a concealer sponge in her hand, and she's working on a bruise across Miko's collarbone the size of a fist.
MIKO: Who was it this week?
SORA: (around the pins) Firefighter.
MIKO: Ooh.
SORA: Very brave. Very boring. Hold still. You look like you lost a fight with a truck.
MIKO: I'd take the truck.
On the couch, Dae-sung is scrolling his phone so fast his thumb is a blur.
DAE-SUNG: Okay. You're trending in fourteen countries. Rin's high note from last night has a hundred million views. People are calling Aya's sword dance a religious experience.
Aya sinks lower into her collar. Last night her hands shook for an hour. Somewhere, a hundred million people are calling that religious.
DAE-SUNG: And nobody has connected you to the mechs. Nobody. You walked off a stage and saved a city, and the internet thinks you went home and slept.
NARI: We did not go home and sleep.
DAE-SUNG: That's the beauty of it.
The announcement (13:40 to 14:30)
Kurenai Ent. // top floor
The conference room on the top floor is glass on three sides. Below it, a city with no power, gray to the horizon. At the head of the table Ryo stands in a perfect suit and a crimson tie, pressed and shaved, like last night happened to someone else.
RYO: Five weeks from today, TIDEWALL makes its comeback. One night only. Every won goes to flood relief for the Tide Wards. We announce at noon.
Miko looks up from the table.
MIKO: Every won?
RYO: Every won.
He means it. That's the hard part about Ryo. He usually means it.
Rin hasn't taken her eyes off him since she sat down. Miko can feel it from two chairs away, like heat off a stove.
RIN: Where is he.
The room goes still. Ryo straightens a cufflink that doesn't need straightening.
RYO: He's receiving care. Dr. Jang is with him.
RIN: Where.
RYO: Somewhere he can't hurt anyone. Including himself. Our statement calls him an unidentified survivor, Rin. For his sake, I'd like it to stay that way.
It isn't a threat. It's a kindness with a lock on it.
Rin says nothing. Miko watches her say nothing, and then looks away, because watching it is worse.
"untitled 47" (14:30 to 15:40)
Kurenai Ent. // studio
The label's team is playing beats for the comeback single off a laptop on the mixing desk. The four of them are on the couch at the back of the studio, slumped in a row like they've been poured there.
Beat one. Fine. Beat two. Fine. Nari drums her fingers on the arm of the couch and thinks about sleep.
Beat three opens with a kick drum like a heartbeat and a low, warm synth that rolls the way water pulls back off sand. On top of it, a strange little melody that sounds found instead of written.
Her fingers stop.
She knows that kick. She tuned that kick. She knows the tiny click at the front of the synth where she cut the sample one frame too early at three in the morning and decided she liked it.
A&R: This one. This is the single.
On the monitor, the file name: untitled 47. Under it, on the credit sheet: Producer: Seo Haru.
Miko reads it twice. Then she turns her whole body toward Nari.
MIKO: (whisper-yelling) That's yours.
NARI: It's a beat.
MIKO: You made that in your room! At three in the morning! I heard it through the wall!
NARI: Everybody has beats.
MIKO: Nari.
NARI: I sent him a folder once. For notes.
She shrugs. Her face stays exactly where she puts it. Her hand finds the chain at her neck and holds on.
The label plays "untitled 47" one more time, loud. Aya's eyes close. Miko's knee starts bouncing in spite of herself. Rin stares at the speakers like they owe her something.
When the bridge comes, Nari's lips move with it. No sound. She knows every piece of it. She put every piece there.
Act Four: The Pier (15:40 to 18:00)
The bathroom (15:40 to 16:10)
Breakwater // dorm
The Breakwater dorm, late, on backup power. The hallway lights hum at half strength. Rin stands at the bathroom sink with the tap running and doesn't put her hands under it.
She puts her palm flat on her chest instead.
There. Under her own heartbeat. Slow and heavy. A bass line under a melody.
For a year and a half it was out in the bay, far away, a feeling more than a sound. Tonight it's in the city. A few kilometers from where she's standing. She could almost point to it.
Down the hall, Miko's music is playing through the wall, too loud. Miko only plays it that loud when she doesn't want to think.
Flashback: Rig 12 (16:10 to 16:50)
Breakwater // sim bay // 3 yrs ago
Three years ago. The sim bay after midnight. A long dark hall of cockpit rigs on hydraulic arms, every one of them dead except one. Rig 12.
Rin, Year One. Twenty-one, sweating through her shirt, losing.
A sim Brinemaw lunges out of the screen. She fires early. Misses. Every screen goes red. SIM TERMINATED. She slaps the reset. Again. Red. Again.
KAITO: You're chasing it.
He's leaning on the rig's ladder with a can of vending machine coffee. Twenty-three. No glow. Just a tired test pilot in a gray Kurenai jacket, the first resonant pilot in the world, acting like he isn't.
KAITO: Everybody chases it. It's big, so you think you have to be fast. You don't.
RIN: Then what?
KAITO: Wait. It opens up. Half a second, right before it commits. Wait for that. Then don't miss.
She resets. The sim comes. Every nerve she has screams fire. She doesn't. She counts. It lunges, and for half a second its jaw opens.
She fires. SIM COMPLETE.
She turns around in the seat. He lifts his coffee can at her, a small salute.
KAITO: Again tomorrow?
It isn't really a question.
When they leave, one other rig at the far end of the hall is still lit. Someone else, drilling alone after midnight. Neither of them looks back at it.
Flashback: the pier (16:50 to 17:30)
Breakwater // the pier // 3 yrs ago
The pier past the dorm, off-limits after curfew. Black sea on one side. Every light in the city on the other, like someone spilled them.
They walk the length of it an arm's width apart, the way you walk when you are being very careful not to do anything wrong.
He hums under his breath. Four or five slow notes going down and coming back up, like a boat on a swell.
RIN: What is that?
KAITO: My dad's. He sang it on the boat every morning before dawn. He said it kept the sea calm.
RIN: Did it work?
KAITO: Every morning but one.
She doesn't ask which morning. Everyone who was in this city twelve years ago knows which morning.
At the end of the pier they stop. He doesn't kiss her. She doesn't kiss him. They stand with the arm's width between them, and it's the most against-the-rules thing either of them has ever done.
Up the path from the dorm, a tall figure has stopped in the dark. He watches them for a long moment. Then he turns and walks back the way he came.
Neither of them sees him.
Flashback: the deep test (17:30 to 18:00)
Observation deck // 18 months ago
A year and a half ago. The observation deck above the bay. Rin isn't supposed to be here. She's here.
On the screens: Zero, Kaito's prototype, going down the trench wall on cables. Five hundred meters. Seven hundred. The numbers keep climbing and the light on the camera feed keeps getting smaller. Dr. Jang sits at the main console, very calm.
DR. JANG: Link is deep and holding. Kaito, talk to me.
KAITO (comms): It's quiet down here.
DR. JANG: Good.
KAITO (comms): No. Doctor. It's listening.
Every reading on every screen jumps at once. The cable alarms start screaming. On the camera feed, black water closes over Zero's light, and the light goes out.
Rin has her hand flat on the glass.
That night, alone in her bunk, she feels it for the first time. A second heartbeat. Under hers.
BACK TO PRESENT. The same pier, tonight. Rin stands at the end of it alone, in the dark. Behind her, for the first time in her life, the city is black. She hums four notes of a song that isn't hers, and stops, because she can't remember the rest.
Act Five: The Hatch (18:00 to 20:00)
The hangar doors (18:00 to 19:10)
Breakwater // hangar
Word goes around the Breakwater faster than any announcement ever has. They're coming back. VANTA held the Tide Wards all day while the city pumped out its basements, and now they're coming home.
By dusk the hangar doors are open and the whole Breakwater is crowded in front of them. Class 7. The junior classes. Mechanics in coveralls. Label staff still holding their tablets. Nobody was told to come. Everybody came.
Miko has wedged herself into the front row. If something new and black and terrifying is about to roll into her hangar, she wants to see it first.
The Oh twins are working the crowd behind her, one with a notebook, one with a fan of cash.
HA-EUN: Odds on who's flying the big one.
HA-JUN: Odds on who's flying the sniper.
GUN-WOO: Me. Put me down for me.
HA-EUN: You're standing right here, Gun-woo.
GUN-WOO: ...Put me down for next year.
Jun shoulders through to the front and stops next to Miko, wiping his hands on a rag that's dirtier than his hands.
JUN: Since when does VANTA have actual mechs?
DAE-SUNG: Nobody knew. Not the label. Not socials. Not me. And I know everything.
At the very back, a tall woman with a long black braid over one shoulder stands in a black VANTA candidate suit. Reina. She trains with VANTA every single day. She has no machine. Her face is perfectly calm. Her fingers are holding the end of her braid very, very tightly.
TIDEWALL stands in front of everyone. Aya half behind Rin's shoulder. Nari with her headphones around her neck. Rin with her arms crossed, two days without sleep showing only in how still she's standing.
The launch cradles groan. Three matte black machines roll in out of the dusk with rain still running off their plates, and the whole crowd goes quiet at once.
Up close they're worse. The way a knife is worse up close.
Three hatches (19:10 to 20:00)
Breakwater // hangar
The sniper frame opens first. A woman with a short black shag and one white streak climbs down the ladder chewing gum, and blows a pink bubble until it pops.
YUNA: What. You thought I was just good at the sims?
HA-JUN: (paying out) I had Gun-woo.
On her way across the floor, Yuna passes Reina and doesn't slow down.
YUNA: Yours is coming.
REINA: So everyone says.
The giant frame opens next. The man who climbs out has to duck to clear the hatch. Huge, weathered, going gray, old Iron Years patches on his shoulders. Kang Moo-jin. Their drill instructor. The man who has yelled at every single person in this crowd at least once.
He drops off the last rung, rolls his shoulders, and looks at all of them staring at him.
MOO-JIN: What. Somebody had to.
Rin hears Miko's breath stop next to her. Miko's mouth is hanging open. She doesn't close it.
Then there's only one left. The mech from the pier, standing at the end of the line with its visor dark. On the gantry above it, Ryo nods once.
The hatch swings open.
A man is sitting in the dark cockpit in a heavy black flight suit, his hands still on the sticks. He doesn't climb out. He doesn't wave. Every person in this hangar has lost to him in the sims at least once, and they all realize who it is in the same second.
TAE: ...Shin.
Nobody else says a word.
Shin's eyes move across the crowd. Past Moo-jin. Past Yuna. Past Miko and Nari and Aya.
They stop on Rin.
He looks at her a beat too long. She knows that look. She has seen it across a sim bay, across a classroom, across a stage. She has never once let herself count how long it lasts.
She looks back. Neither of them speaks first.
HOLD on Shin's face in the hatch, looking at Rin.
CUT TO BLACK.